President Biden and his aides planned NATO’s 75th anniversary celebrations, which opened in Washington on Tuesday evening, to create an atmosphere of confidence.
The message to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and other potential adversaries is that after more than two years of war in Ukraine, a larger, more powerful group of Western allies has emerged that is more committed than ever to pushing back against aggression.
But as 38 world leaders began arriving on Monday, that confidence appeared at risk. Even before the summit formally began, uncertainty about whether Biden would go ahead with his re-election bid and the possibility of a return of former President Donald J. Trump cast a shadow over it.
Trump has declared NATO “obsolete,” threatened to withdraw from the alliance and more recently said he would let Russia “do whatever it wants” if he believed the alliance wasn’t contributing enough to any member. In recent days, as Trump’s approval rating has risen in post-debate polls, key European allies have begun discussing what a second Trump term would mean for NATO — and whether the alliance can stand up to Russia without American weapons, money and intelligence gathering.
On Tuesday evening, Biden will greet leaders at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, a few blocks from the White House, where the founding treaty of NATO was signed by President Harry S. Truman in 1949. Biden was 6 years old at the time, and the Cold War was just beginning.
He is 81 and perhaps Washington’s most outspoken supporter of the alliance, which has grown from 12 members in 1949 to 32 today as the era of superpower conflict returns. But when they gather Tuesday night, leaders will be watching Biden’s every move and hanging on his every word for the same signal Americans are watching — whether he can stay in office for another four years.
Biden knows this, and in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday, he said he welcomes the scrutiny. “Who can hold NATO together like I can?” the president asked rhetorically. “I guess a good way to judge me,” he said, is to watch him at the summits — and see how the allies react. “Come and listen. See what they say.”
NATO leaders arrived acknowledging that the alliance was facing a test they had not anticipated: whether the alliance could credibly maintain the momentum it had built in support of Ukraine at a time when confidence in the country had never been more fragile.
They also know that Putin and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, are watching.
“NATO has never been, is not and will never be taken for granted,” outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said in a wide-ranging discussion with reporters on Sunday. “For 75 years, we have been able to do this successfully. I am sure that we will be able to do it in the future as well. But it is about political leadership, it is about political commitment.”
Months before the meeting, the alliance began preparing for Trump’s re-election as president. Establishing a new NATO command Ensure long-term delivery of weapons and military aid to Ukraine even in the event of a U.S. troop withdrawal under Trump.
But in conversations with NATO leaders, it became clear that NATO’s plans to modernize its military and prepare for an era of confrontation with Russia in the coming decades have not been accompanied by a commensurate increase in the military budget.
More than 20 NATO members have now met the goal of spending 2% of gross national product on defense, fulfilling pledges some made in response to Trump’s demands and others in response to the reality of a Russian invasion. Many Biden aides say that proportion — a goal set more than a decade ago when terrorism seemed the greatest threat — appears far below the current task.
In Europe, Germany has unveiled plans to upgrade its military capabilities to deter Russian aggression, a reform that Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised in the weeks after the Russian invasion. But Scholz’s grand plans have yet to come with a budget to pay for them, and the politics of getting the public on board are so thorny that German officials have refused to put a price tag on them.
Carl Bildt, Co-Chairman of the European Council on Foreign Relations and former Prime Minister of Sweden Recently wrote European countries “need to double their budgets again” to “effectively contain the threat posed by an increasingly desperate Russian regime.”
Still, White House officials said Monday that Biden would not ask for new military spending targets.
But the more pressing issue for Biden and Scholz is avoiding another public spat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy over how to characterize Ukraine’s eventual membership in NATO.
Last year, when Zelensky went to Vilnius, Lithuania to attend the annual NATO meeting, he expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of a timetable for Ukraine’s joining NATO. He wrote on social media at the time: “There is no timetable set for either the invitation or Ukraine’s joining NATO. This is unprecedented and absurd.”
When he arrived, his mood was temporarily calmed by NATO’s promise that Ukraine would be exempt from some of the hurdles that other countries had to go through before joining the alliance.
But NATO countries have been negotiating for months on wording to address the issue so that Ukraine would not join the alliance during the war.
Diplomats involved in the talks said that in recent weeks, negotiators began to determine a new approach: NATO is expected to declare Ukraine’s eventual membership “irreversible.”
While “irreversible” sounds clear, it does nothing to address Zelensky’s core demand — the date by which his country will be protected under NATO’s umbrella.
Obviously, Zelensky’s situation is the most critical. But it is not the only one.
NATO was founded in the early days of the Cold War to contain the Soviet threat. Seventy-five years later, some current and potential future leaders among NATO members appear sympathetic to Russia’s diplomatic entreaties, despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban Visited Russia In a public speech alongside Putin a few days ago, he did not criticize Russia’s invasion or its continued attacks on civilians, and he hinted that he was seeking peace talks on terms similar to those Russia was demanding.
The White House criticized the trip on Monday. John F. Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Orban’s visit “clearly did not produce results on Ukraine,” adding, “That’s concerning.”
But in an effort to avoid any public split within NATO on the eve of the summit, Stoltenberg refrained from criticizing Orban, instead noting that “NATO allies interact with Moscow in different ways and at different levels.”
However, he said that trying to reach a compromise while Putin makes progress in Ukraine would not ultimately bring peace. “We all want peace,” Stoltenberg said. “It is always possible to end a war by losing a war. But that does not bring peace — it brings occupation, and occupation is not peace.”
